Friday, June 28, 2013
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Native
We can work until out backs give out, digging and pulling out rocks and planting new things and meanwhile these two native species quietly reappear each spring no matter what we do.
The lady slipper (aka moccasin flower) is a treasure in our woods.
I learned this while reading Home Bird by Laura Wainwright
Most plants develop seeds that contain their own food supply, but the seeds of the lady's slipper do not. They rely on the presence of a fungus in the soil whose threads break open the seeds and provide the food. It's a symbiotic relationship ...over time, the lady slipper provides the fungus with nutrients it needs. This is why this "wild orchid" cannot be transplanted.
Once the lady slipper is mature it needs the help a bee to spread the pollen from one to another.
It is a complex system.
Have I written about this before? Every year it is as if I am finding this elusive flower for the first time. Our woods are full of them, but you have to look carefully to find them.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Thank you, Woodrow! At last!
I wish I could find the pictures I took on the day each of my daughters went to the local school gym to vote for the first time in a national election. We all felt the importance of it. It amazes me to realize that American women didn't get the right to vote until 1920- that was during MY MOTHER'S lifetime. Ninety three years ago.
Carrie and Eliza's great grandmother, Barbara Blackman O'Neil, was a leader in the Suffragette Movement in St. Louis. Below a short review of the history.
On this date, June 4 in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate. Fifteen months later, it was ratified by the necessary 36 state legislatures, giving American women the right to vote.
Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere.
But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both houses of Congress the following May.
Carrie and Eliza's great grandmother, Barbara Blackman O'Neil, was a leader in the Suffragette Movement in St. Louis. Below a short review of the history.
On this date, June 4 in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate. Fifteen months later, it was ratified by the necessary 36 state legislatures, giving American women the right to vote.
Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere.
But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both houses of Congress the following May.
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